On a rather wet day in October, RISC OS users turned out to Guildford College see what's going on in the RISC OS world. The following is a brief outline of what was going on there today.

Geminus

A big announcement at the show was that of Geminus. Last week on the Aemulor support forums, Neil Spellings posted the logo of the Geminus project, and let everybody start guessing as to what it might be. As reported earlier today, Geminus allows Iyonix users to have multiple PCI graphics cards (up to eight are supported, but the Iyonix only allows for an additional three) and have a single desktop spanning them all. There was a two monitor setup on display at the show, being demonstrated by Neil and Adrian (Who at one point had a nice debugging session), and punters were shown how Geminus allows for applications to take over the second screen and still have a fully functioning RISC OS desktop on the other. Geminus also allows owners of monitors that can rotate to rotate the screen and have RISC OS running in portrait mode. Aparently, this will all be available within the coming couple of months, in the mean time you can order your second or third PCI graphics cards and the LCD monitors to go with them ready for the release of the software.

Unix Porting Project/Iyonix Linux

Peter "Chocky" Naulls was present at the show selling subscriptions and CDs for his Unix Porting Project as well as demonstrating Debian Linux running on an Iyonix machine. I also managed to catch Peter's theatre presentation, in which he mentioned that he has a compiled binary of Mozilla's Firefox browser, but it is still quite a way from being released or usable. Although it isn't available yet, it is still very good news that work is being done to bring an uptodate browser to the RISC OS scene. In the meantime, he was demonstrating Dillo, which is a nice and simple browser, but he did still suggest that for the time being, NetSurf and the other RISC OS browsers are your best bet for serious RISC OS browsing.

RComp/RComp Interactive

As usual, RComp and RComp Interactive were present at the show, showing off their latest developments, as well as a series of PC laptops and mini-PCs running VirtualRiscPC. Discounts were offered on their gaming products (as announced earlier this week), which will last for the next week for telephone orders if you couldn't make the show. RCI were also showing off their good taste by demonstrating their WebsterXL browser with a certain RISC OS related website, and showing their improved versions of DialUp3 and NetFetch2 as well as their Grapevine IRC/MSN/ICQ package. Also on offer from RCI were their RISCBook and RISCCube64 machines, which are essentially Windows based PCs running VirtualRiscPC.

MW Software

Martin Wuerthner was also present and demonstrating the latest version of the ArtWorks2 graphics package, which now includes ClipView, graduated transparencies and many bugfixes. As well as ArtWorks2, Martin was also talking about his Gimp-Print drivers for RISC OS, which allow printing to the latest inkjet printers.

Fortran Friends

The Fortran Friends were showing off their software, including their Bell Ringing simulations (including a new version of !Methods), and they were joined by John Norris who was demonstrating his !Stringing program with a model bell attached to an A7000.

And the rest...

Also present at the show, were RISCOS Ltd and Castle, who as we all know have now made friends again, and are going to merge RISC OS 4 and 5. RISCOS Ltd's stand also sported a glass sphere which had flashing/moving/changing pictures on it, but it is still unclear as to whether it was RISC OS powered or not...

CJE, as usual, had everything in stock on their stand, as did APDL who were selling their wide range of RISC OS titles. ITC had a range of RiscPC spares, including some complete systems for sale in various configurations. John Cartmell was present, selling subscriptions and back issues of Quercus and Acorn Publisher and Archive were also selling their back issues as well as their subscriptions. Finally, Virtual Acorn have a version of VirtualRiscPC for Linux, which they were demonstrating to the punters at their stand.

All in all, it was a nice day out, and I doubt that many people left empty handed as there were plenty of bargains to be had at the charity stall.